The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
by Mandolin77
Summary: A series of short ficlets designed around obscure words that describe emotions we have no other words to explain.
1. Liberosis

_Liberosis: n_. The desire to care less about things.

Allegretto has spent his whole life caring too deeply, too madly, too frantically, defending people who were not his responsibility to defend. He has risked, yes, his safety, and his dark, damp junk yard home, but he has risked something else too, when he knelt down and put his coat around a shivering, wide-eyed, dark-eyed Beat.

He had risked his freedom.

Allegretto has always known that he would leave someday, would pack up everything he could carry on his back and walk out of this tiny little town that did not love him, that would not miss him when he was gone. He would spare what bread he could for the orphans while he was here, but he wasn't going to stay—not for them, not for anyone. He was going to carve out a place where he would fit in the world, he was going to find somewhere that opened its arms for him instead of turning its back. He would _belong_ somewhere, for gods' sakes. He would find a place that he could really, truly call home.

All that changed when he met Beat, when he invited Beat into his little dugout under the city's restless feet. Beat looked at him, crying and shaking and cold, and scared, and alone, and Allegretto had recognized it, had remembered being that thin-lipped little boy once upon a time. So he bent down and he put his coat over Beat's haggard shoulders and took him by the hand, and as they walked together he looked up at the blue sea sky to watch those great big plans fly away without him.

He doesn't regret it, not really—but there are times, in the unspeakable darkness of his own private mind, that he resents it. He'll lie awake and look at Beat fast asleep, curled into a ball on Allegretto's bedroll and think, _I could be gone. I could be somewhere better by now if it weren't for you._

Sometimes it makes him angry. Most of the time, it just makes him sad, and he gets up and wanders out to look at the stars and wonder, silently, if there was a word for this, this too much loving of a world that doesn't know how to love you back.


	2. La Gaudière

_La Gaudière: n._ The glint of goodness inside people.

Polka has seen terrible things in her time.

Not, she thinks, so terrible as some people. She has never been on a battlefield, after all, never held the gaunt hands of half-stitched soldiers desperate to survive. No, her horrors are more mundane, more quiet—more honest, maybe, away from the vicious unreality of war. Hers are the small pains of a beggar who won't touch the money she offers him, of a woman who scolds her child for staring too long, of a boy who watches her trip onto the hard stone pavement and then turns pointedly away. Hers are soft sorrows, cried into a pillow at night as her mother listens at the door, both their chests aching for a heartlessness they had not known until sickness crept into their lives.

 _You don't have to go,_ her mother tells her, begs her, _Please, Polka, listen to me. You don't have to do this. We'll get by somehow._

But this isn't about the money, and it isn't about her mother, and it isn't about the fact that someday she will be dead and gone and too far away to touch the hands of all the people she never met while she was too busy hiding behind her bedroom door. This is about the fact that there is _good_ in those people, somewhere, buried under all that fear and anger and—

And if there isn't, why bother with the extraordinary strain of being alive?

So she gets up every morning and gets dressed, plaits her hair over breakfast as she watches her mother's trembling fingers tie colored ribbons around the scented burlap satchels she will take into town. They do not talk of it, although both of them have words on the tips of their tongues. Instead they chat about flowers and storms and how the cream they left out for the cats is already gone, tie their world up in little things as Solfege threads the ribbons through the little signs that read _Floral Powder_ in flourishing black script. She thinks Polka has seen too much of the world already.

Polka thinks she has not seen quite enough.


	3. Kuebiko

_Kuebiko: n._ _A_ state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence.

Jazz feels like he's been old his whole life. There is a vague imprint in the back of his mind of being a child, happy and free and restless and bare-footed as he ran through the green hills behind his mother's little wooden house, but lately he's begun to wonder if that might just be a memory that belongs to someone else.

What he remembers now is all heaviness and fear, the weight of his armor and his sword still hanging off his shoulders even when he hangs them on the wall by his bed each night. He feels like he's always tensed up, his stomach in knots and his heart in his throat, waiting for the peace to come crashing down around his ears like shards of broken glass. He is strong. He is capable.

He is twenty-seven years old, and he's ready to be done.

It's not that he doesn't care for the people around him, it's not that he wouldn't do _anything_ to stand by them for as long as he possibly could, but he's just so tired of this whole backwards world that keeps eating up all the boy he tries to train to be men. He isn't ready for it to be over, not really, not yet, but there are days when all he wants is to lie down in the tender-dark arms of his underground caverns and go to sleep for a while.

There is no rest, though, so he rises to don his armor again, feels the heft of it in his hands and in his heart. _People are dying_ , he thinks, sits down on the edge of his bed as his knees buckle a little at the thought. He can't leave them to this disaster alone, and he wonders, did the child he used to be ever think of this, of the _barbarity_ humans are capable of? Was he ever this tired before the world went cruel?

He stands up and walks out, falls back into his military footsteps—one, two, one, two, Claves to his right side, Falsetto to his left, and behind him the long stream of men and women who are following Jazz because they believe Jazz has the answers that will lead them to a better tomorrow. It weighs upon him, but he smiles and struggles not to show it.

There is, he'd learned, a special kind of weariness that comes when you surround yourself with people who will meet a sudden end.


End file.
